Feature Channels: Speech & Language

• share
• favorite_border

Research finds orangutans communicate using a complex repertoire of consonant-like calls, more so than African apes.

• share
• favorite_border

An engineering professor from Chula has designed “Gowajee”, a Thai-language speech recognition AI capable of delivering speech-to-text/ text-to-speech with the accuracy of a native speaker while keeping users’ data secure. Having been rolled out in call centers, and depression patients screening process, Gowajee is set to be adapted to many other functions.

• share
• favorite_border

As part of its commitment to promote youth education in the St. Louis community, Saint Louis University’s School of Education is proud to announce it is an official 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee regional partner to give local students and schools the opportunity to participate in America’s longest-running educational competition.

• share
• favorite_border

Studying whether animals possess additional language-related skills can help us understand what it takes to learn speech and reveal the history of its evolution. Andrea Ravignani and colleagues studied seal pups' vocal plasticity, or how well they can adjust their own voices to compensate for their environment, and found that seal pups can change the pitch and volume of their voices, much like humans can. Ravignani will discuss his work linking vocal learning with vocal plasticity and rhythmic capacity at the 183rd ASA Meeting.

• share
• favorite_border

At the 183rd ASA Meeting, Kenton Hummel will describe how soundscape research in day cares can improve child and provider outcomes and experiences. He and his team collaborated with experts in engineering, sensing, early child care, and health to monitor three day care centers for 48-hour periods. High noise levels and long periods of loud fluctuating sound can negatively impact children and staff by increasing the effort it takes to communicate. In contrast, a low background noise level allows for meaningful speech, which is essential for language, brain, cognitive, and social/emotional development.

• share
• favorite_border

Here are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Behavioral Science channel on Newswise, a free source for journalists.

• share
• favorite_border

A singer’s primary genre can impact the likelihood of developing vocal fold injury and may even influence the specific type of injury that occurs, a recent study by UT Southwestern researchers suggests.

• share
• favorite_border

A new multicenter study will use artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze pre-surgical brain MRI scans to predict individual-level language outcomes in English- and Spanish-learning children up to four years after cochlear implantation. The long-term goal of the research is to customize therapy to maximize children’s hearing and language ability after receiving a cochlear implant.

• share
• favorite_border

The LaundryCares Foundation welcomes the community of Abilene, Texas to experience a Free Laundry and Literacy Day event at Laundry Luv on Wednesday, December 7.

• share
• favorite_border

A new project aims to improve communications between communities and those involved in international development work.

• share
• favorite_border

“PRAISE, Preparing for Readiness and Academic Improvement for pre-School English Learners.” PRAISE is designed to improve the quality of instruction for English language learners and enhance educators’ ability to support preschool English language learners’ readiness for kindergarten. FAU is one of 44 institutions nationwide selected to receive this grant in 2022.

• share
• favorite_border

Our brains “time-stamp” the order of incoming sounds, allowing us to correctly process the words that we hear, shows a new study by a team of psychology and linguistics researchers.

• share
• favorite_border

Managers need to make a consistent impression in order to motivate and inspire people, and that applies even more to video communication than to other digital channels. That is the result of a study by researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). They investigated the influence that charismatic leadership tactics used in text, audio and video communication channels have on employee performance. They focused on mobile work and the gig economy, in which jobs are flexibly assigned to freelancers via online platforms. The results of the study have been published in The Leadership Quarterly. (DOI: 10.1016/j.leaqua.2022.101631)

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers with University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Nursing analyzed the comments in open-ended responses from a survey about making decisions on major medical treatments to gain insight into the words used by patients and families and how they conceptualize the various treatments.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study by a University of Adelaide researcher has recommended improvements to beach safety signage, which could prevent drownings in the future.

• share
• favorite_border

Why are we such chatty, musical animals? Evolutionary biologists think that our capacities for speech and music may be linked: only animals that can learn new vocalisations—such as humans and songbirds—seem to have a sense of rhythm.

• share
• favorite_border

A recent study, published in Current Biology, led by researchers at Stockholm University and Uppsala University, has shown that juvenile songbirds react to hearing the songs they will eventually produce as adults, even when they are as young as 12 days old.

• share
• favorite_border

New research finds the No. 1 reason world language educators chose their path was due to a world language teacher they had in high school, suggesting recruitment of these educators will be paramount in confronting shortages

• share
• favorite_border

A new three-year grant for more than $200,000 from the South Korean government will help spotlight the Korean language and its impact both in the region and larger world.

• share
• favorite_border

Here are some of the latest articles that have been posted in the Guns and Violence channel on Newswise.

• share
• favorite_border

The woodpecker forebrain contains specialized pecking-related regions that resemble those associated with song and language systems.

• share
• favorite_border

Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury, a type of knee injury that usually occurs during sports, is becoming more common among children and teenagers. When surgery is recommended for children and teenagers with an injury to the ACL, the operation should be done promptly. But children and teenagers whose parents principally speak a language other than English are at doubled risk of delayed surgery, according to a study in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research® (CORR®), a publication of The Association of Bone and Joint Surgeons®. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

• share
• favorite_border

The increasing demand for electric vehicles and cell phones has accelerated the need for safer energy storage after numerous instances of commercial lithium-ion batteries overheating and catching fire. Peng Bai, assistant professor of energy, environmental & chemical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St.

• share
• favorite_border

What someone says out loud about a group of people and how they actually feel about them aren’t always the same thing, but a person’s true sentiments about other groups of people can be revealed by the language patterns they use in describing their feelings. That’s one of the key findings from a new study by David Markowitz, an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

• share
• favorite_border

UC Davis Health is recruiting people for a clinical trial, BrainGate2, with the goal of building a “neurological prosthesis” for restoring speech to people who have lost — or are losing — the ability to speak due to injuries like stroke or diseases like ALS.

• share
• favorite_border

A new book co-authored by a University of South Australia academic gives an insight into how text messaging – celebrating its 30th birthday this year – has been driven by technology and young people.

• share
• favorite_border

The evolution of the human larynx contributed to the stable voices we use to communicate. The morphological changes do not include the addition of structures but rather the loss of specific vocal folds or cords in the larynx, providing a stable voice quality and controllable voice pitch used when singing or speaking.

• share
• favorite_border

Our brain works a bit like the autocomplete function on your phone – it is constantly trying to guess the next word when we are listening to a book, reading or conducting a conversation.

• share
• favorite_border

JMIR Publications recently published "Speech and Language Practitioners’ Experiences of Commercially Available Voice-Assisted Technology: Web-Based Survey Study" in JMIR Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies which reported the professional experiences of UK speech and language therapists using voice-assisted technology (VAT) (e.g. Alexa, Siri) with their clients to identify the potential applications and barriers to VAT adoption and thereby inform future directions of research.

• share
• favorite_border

Here are some of the latest articles that have been added to the Drug Resistance channel on Newswise, a free source for journalists.

• share
• favorite_border

Michael Nolting, a business major at UNC who just finished his freshman year, is sharing his dream with the world — and it’s no ordinary dream. It’s one that came to him more than four years ago in a deep sleep, involving an apocalyptic alien invasion that he never quite got out of his mind.

• share
• favorite_border

Many of our everyday activities involve a certain degree of risk – whether to our work, finances or health. But how is risk perceived within a society and how do individuals think about risk?